Risky business: managing electronic payments in the 21st Century

On June 20 and 21, 2005, the Payment Cards Center of the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, in conjunction with the Electronic Funds Transfer Association (EFTA), hosted a day-and-a-half forum, “Risky Business: Managing Electronic Payments in the 21st Century.” The Center and EFTA invited participants from the financial services and processing sectors, law enforcement, academia, and policymakers to explore key topics associated with the challenge of effectively managing risk in a payments environment that is increasingly electronic. The meeting’s goal was to identify areas of potential risk and explore interindustry solutions. This paper provides highlights from the forum presentations and ensuing conversations.

Single-shot compressed ultrafast photography: a review

Compressed ultrafast photography (CUP) is a burgeoning single-shot computational imaging technique that provides an imaging speed as high as 10 trillion frames per second and a sequence depth of up to a few hundred frames. This technique synergizes compressed sensing and the streak camera technique to capture nonrepeatable ultrafast transient events with a single shot. With recent unprecedented technical developments and extensions of this methodology, it has been widely used in ultrafast optical imaging and metrology, ultrafast electron diffraction and microscopy, and information security protection. We review the basic principles of CUP, its recent advances in data acquisition and image reconstruction, its fusions with other modalities, and its unique applications in multiple research fields

The Value of User-Visible Internet Cryptography

Cryptographic mechanisms are used in a wide range of applications, including email clients, web browsers, document and asset management systems, where typical users are not cryptography experts. A number of empirical studies have demonstrated that explicit, user-visible cryptographic mechanisms are not widely used by non-expert users, and as a result arguments have been made that cryptographic mechanisms need to be better hidden or embedded in end-user processes and tools. Other mechanisms, such as HTTPS, have cryptography built-in and only become visible to the user when a dialogue appears due to a (potential) problem. This paper surveys deployed and potential technologies in use, examines the social and legal context of broad classes of users, and from there, assesses the value and issues for those users

Robust pre-processing techniques for non-ideal iris images

The human iris has been demonstrated to be a very accurate, non-invasive and easy-to-use biometric for personal identification. Most of the current state-of-the-art iris recognition systems require the iris acquisition to be ideal. A lot of constraints are hence put on the user and the acquisition process.;Our aim in this research is to relax these conditions and to develop a pre-processing algorithm, which can be used in conjunction with any matching algorithm to handle the so-called non-ideal iris images. In this thesis we present a few robust techniques to process the non-ideal iris images so as to give a segmented iris image to the matching algorithm. The motivation behind this work is to reduce the false reject rates of the current recognition systems and to reduce the intra-class variability. A new technique for estimating and compensating the angle in non-frontal iris images is presented. We have also developed a novel segmentation algorithm, which uses an ellipse-fitting approach for localizing the pupil. A fast and simple limbus boundary segmentation algorithm is also presented